Mays’ Buns and Roses meeting took us a
little deeper behind the glitzy showbiz face of Bollywood chorus lines
into the deeply spiritual world of Bharatnatyam dance with our expert
with bells on (and then some!) Shrikant. Shrikant trained in
India and now travels the world teaching and educating people on the
cultural routes, symbolism and spirituality of this art form which could
be loosely compared to the Indian form of ballet with a heavy mystic
influence!

Bharatnatyam dance was originally founded within the
Hindu temples of Southern India performed by women but found a popular
revival and explosion post independence in India in 1947 with many men
taking up the practice. For his first presentation Shrikant
performed a purely technical piece introducing all of the lovely Rosee’s
assembled to the movements of

Bharatnatyam set to traditional Indian
music, including movements that represent elements and forms in nature
whilst drawing on and transliterating the spiritual energy of the world.

In his second recital, Shrikant introduced us to the emotive
interpretative dance form of Bharatnatyam, giving his own presentation
of a modern story of one woman’s connection with nature and the purpose
in life this has presented her.

For his finale we were given a
glimpse of the art as it would have originally been performed as a
spiritual piece combining the emotive and technical as a means of
telling a story and expressing associated emotions to an audience within
a temple setting, in his homage to Krishna, the Beautiful One.

All
of us left feeling a little happier in the world with Shrikants’
beautiful movement and talk having brought a touch more joy to our inner
selves.

We've had a book club offshoot of Buns and Roses WI for a
few years now and we've done all sorts of books over the last few years but the
focus over the last 18 months has been either books by women or about inspirational
female characters. We are a very free and easy book club in that we only have a
couple of rules - namely you don't have to have finished the book (and not mind
finding out what happens) and it has to be available from the library so that
people don't have to buy it - though of course it is up to each attendee
whether they purchase the book or not and some of the fun each meeting is
looking at our various copies and seeing what kind of market the bookseller is
trying to appeal to over the years - a book like Gone With The Wind by Margaret
Mitchell which we read (or in the majority of cases started and didn't finish)
has had many different cover incarnations over the years, as had Charlotte
Bronte's gothic masterpiece Jane Eyre.

We meet roughly every 6 weeks or so (exact date determined amongst those at the
meeting) at 2.30pm on a Sunday afternoon in the Tiled Hall Cafe just inside the
Art Gallery on the Headrow and the next one is Sunday June 28th when we'll be
discussing Caitlin Moran's funny and frank latest How To Build A Girl. And it's
also at the meeting that we decide what book we're going to read next - we all
bring suggestions and sometime we reach a decision by consensus and sometimes
by writing the titles on bits of paper and pulling them out of a bag.

So come along chat, eat cake, and meet other book loving ladies. Hope to see
some of you there.